Jewish Tetouan: place, community, and ethnic boundaries from the Minutes Book of the community board, 1929-46

ABSTRACT

This article explores the limits, meaning, and practice of ‘Jewish Tetouan’ for its community members during the Spanish Protectorate in Morocco. The study shows how Jewish Tetouan constituted a set of social relationships and networks. The cultural content was not the most crucial element determining the community members’ interpretation of ‘insiders’ and ‘outsiders’. Rather, the limits of the community were primarily (re-)confirmed by interactions with several categories of ‘us’ (Sephardic Jews from Tetouan in Tetouan and abroad, other Sephardic Jews from the Spanish Protectorate and Tangier, Moroccan Jews, and other Jews) and several categories of ‘them’ (Spaniards, Muslim Moroccans, and Europeans).

KEYWORDS:

• Jewish Tetouan
• place and space
• identity
• community
• boundaries
• social relationships
• social networks

Our Jewish women friends, when single, asked San Antonio for a boyfriend, and Moorish friends spoke of Miriam – the Virgin Mary – and the Archangel San Gabriel, and Christian women, my life, who upon murdering their husbands, invoked Aixa Candisha.

(Angel Vázquez, La vida perra de Juanita Narboni, 2006)¹

Introduction

The opening quotation from a novel by a Spanish writer from Tangier, Angel Vázquez (Tangier 1929-Madrid 1980), brilliantly captures the fluidity of Tangier’s colonial international society and culture in a tragicomic way. However, this excerpt could easily apply to the social atmosphere and cultural fluidity of the city of Tetouan under colonial domination as well. Unfortunately, the limited initiatives undertaken to preserve Jewish cultural heritage in Morocco rarely capture this background.² For example, if a visitor wishes to visit ‘Jewish Tetouan’ on a guided tour, the local guides will take them to the mellah (the old Jewish neighbourhood, also known and often referred to in the Spanish Zone of Protectorate as Judería), followed by the Ben Walid synagogue – the only preserved synagogue in the old quarter – and, probably, the old building that the first Alliance Israélite Universelle (AIU) School occupied in Tetouan, the cemetery, and, beyond that, the new synagogue and new AIU school. With some exceptions, the protection and preservation of Jewish cultural heritage in Morocco focuses on what could be considered hard, or less hybrid, elements which, though essential, formed only one part of Moroccan Jewish culture. There has also been some research done on intangible aspects of Sephardic cultural heritage, such as early Spanish philological research on language and oral narratives, Issachar Ben-Ami’s studies on popular religion and folklore, and, more recently, Vanessa Paloma Elbaz’s research on musicology, among others, although this scholarship rarely reach a wider public.³

This study starts from the concept of ‘Jewish Tetouan’, but instead of focusing on tangible or intangible aspects of that entity as a cultural site, it explores its meaning for the leadership of the city’s Jewish community during the years of the Spanish Protectorate (1912–1956). The article examines what the idea of ‘Jewish Tetouan’ meant for the community board, approaching this concept without limiting it to a physical place, but, instead, following the intra- and inter-community intersections of social relationships that emerge from the community understanding of that idea. Although Tetouan was not the cosmopolitan city that colonial Tangier was, the town was similarly socially multi-ethnic, culturally fluid, and politically intense. Equally important is that the Protectorate period was also characterized by the expansion of global capitalism, the developments of new global ‘north/south’ relations, intense migration, and transnationalism.

The mobilities of people, things, ideas, and information, have all challenged the situated character of ethnographic research and knowledge, and this is also true of this case, where a single location must necessarily be conceived of as part of a larger context. As observed by Arjun Appadurai, displacement, exile, or migration create powerful attachments to ideas of a homeland and generate the circulation and transaction of things and ideas in both directions.⁴ Moreover, as Fredrik Barth noted in his Introduction to Ethnic Groups and Boundaries, the maintenance of cultural boundaries owes more to cultural interactions than to the persistence of differences.⁵ Similarly, although more focused on cultural content, Steven Aschheim proposes the concept of co-constitutionality, by which the continuous process of interaction with non-Jews contributes to the configuration of Jewish identity. This process has produced not one Jewish culture but several variations of Jewish culture in constant transformation.⁶

The primary ethnographic material for the development of this study is the Minutes Book (MB) of the community board of the Jewish Community of Tetouan from 1929 to 1946, a collection of more than 150 documents on the monthly meetings of the board that shed light on the board members’ understanding of community and ethnic boundaries.⁷

The Jews of Tetouan

Spanish chronicles that write about the Jews of Tetouan after the Spanish army occupied the city during the 1859–60 conflict between Spain and Morocco highlight the poverty and filth of the mellah inhabitants.⁸ Tetouan was not a major urban centre like Fez, Marrakech, or Tangier, but a small, unimportant city. Most of the Jews of Tetouan were of modest means and made their living as artisans or small traders. Their ranks included tailors, carpenters, locksmiths, watchmakers, masons, tinsmiths, goldsmiths, saddlers, blacksmiths, wool weavers, shopkeepers, and farmers. In addition, particular trades were usually performed by Jews, such as muleteers (camalos, in north Moroccan argot), second-hand clothing vendors, street vendors, grocery shopkeepers, moneychangers, shoemakers, and tailors.⁹ When Tetouan was overrun by Spanish troops between 1860 and 1862, its inhabitants discovered new opportunities related to trade and other services required by the occupying forces. Although the Jewish population also profited from these circumstances and the small Jewish businesses that sold local textile products, such as djellabas and slippers, grew with European goods,¹⁰ imports ultimately created financial hardship for the artisans.

In the preceding centuries, however, Tetouan had been a significant commercial centre and corsair stronghold until Tangier’s port was expanded after that city became the diplomatic capital of the Empire. Although Tetouan is located a few kilometres inland on the southwestern Mediterranean coast, it is next to the town of Martil (called Río Martín during the Spanish Protectorate in Morocco), where the river of the same name has its mouth, and the site of the leading Moroccan Mediterranean port up until the eighteenth century. Due to its proximity to Europe, some notable Sephardic Jews and Andalusian Muslim Tetouan families benefited from trade – comprising the lucrative slave trade and the collection of ransoms – with other Mediterranean ports. These included the Marrache and Pariente families, whose descendants were still prominent members of Tetouan’s Jewish community in the early twentieth century.¹¹ The historical importance of mercantile activity in Tetouan explains why the camalos were still one of the most common occupations in the nineteenth century. Indeed, the job of muleteer was the second most common profession engaged in by the Jews of Tetouan, according to the Circumcisions Registry Book (CRB), which lists 210 individuals dedicated to this activity. Most covered the route between Tangier and Tetouan and between Tetouan and the Río Martín customs office.¹²

Nonetheless, the Jews experienced social mobility to a greater extent than the Muslims during the second half of the nineteenth century, owing mainly to their educational opportunities. The wealthiest and most privileged were able to enrol their children in European schools. The Alliance Israélite Universelle, and to a lesser extent, the schools operated by the Anglo-Jewish Association and Board of Deputies of British Jews awarded scholarships to the children of less affluent families. However, there were many Jews, especially in the most remote rural areas, whose children could not obtain a modern education. Indeed, poverty, high birth rates, and the intensification of contacts with Europeans, particularly Spaniards, led to the heavy emigration of Jews from Tetouan and the north of Morocco beginning in the 1860s to the nearby Spanish enclaves of Ceuta and Melilla, southern Spain and Gibraltar, and South America. In many cases, their economic situation did not improve substantially after emigration, and they continued to take on precarious jobs, as in the case of La Linea studied by José María Lázaro Bruña. While wealthy Jews were allowed to settle in British Gibraltar, the majority of the North African Jews who made their homes in the Spanish town of La Linea, next to Gibraltar, were impoverished, with the most common occupations filled by immigrant Jewish men there being -recoveros (people who purchased eggs and other poultry products for resale) and day labourers.¹³

Amongst the 6,000 Jews living in Tetouan after the Spanish Protectorate was established in 1912, poverty was still rife and, indeed, one of the main problems faced by community leaders between 1929 and 1946. In 1929, when Tetouan’s Jewish community board started to record its meetings – according to the new legal framework imposed by the colonial authorities – their primary and most crucial concern was to obtain resources for the board’s charity activities. While the community leaders belonged to the elite merchant class and saw themselves as successors to the earlier ‘councils of notables’, most community members continued to work as small traders, artisans, and labourers. Therefore, there were often insufficient resources to meet the most basic needs of the poorest in the community, such as food, blankets, medical assistance, and school aid for children.¹⁴

As was the case with the communities in the French zone, the primary source of funding for the community board was a tax on kosher meat, followed by bequests and subscriptions or collections for specific purposes, generally for significant expenses like community facilities. The board also received subsidies from the municipal authority and donations collected during the main religious festivals, such as the nedabah (free-will offering) connected to Pesach. This revenue provided the board with the means to attend to general needs related to worship and community welfare.¹⁵

After the new communal Junta constitution was implemented in early January 1929, the meat tax, which had the approval of the Spanish authorities, was almost always a fixture of board discussions.¹⁶ The community board granted this annual tax every year to the highest bidder, who agreed in advance to pay a certain monthly amount to the Junta, which administered the sum. The community leadership also fixed the tax rate that ultimately reached the consumer, with a sofer (Jewish notary) formalizing the contract. However, as the kosher meat tax revenue was unreliable in those years, and the meat supply was not always assured, the Junta decided to make the tax payment an obligatory requirement on the part of the concessionaire. In December 1929, the community council proclaimed that it would ‘not consider any cause, even force majeure, as a reason for not collecting this tax’.¹⁷ Under these circumstances, it became difficult to find someone willing to manage the tax. Successive contractors, such as Messod Botbol and Eli Benatar, repeatedly complained about the financial losses resulting from the duty.¹⁸

Collecting the nedabah, on the other hand, was less problematic, but the amount was still insufficient to meet the community’s financial needs. However, the Junta did not risk increasing it or switching from the devalued Hassani peseta to the Spanish peseta for fear of an adverse reaction from the community contributors.¹⁹ One way to pressure community members to make the nedabah donation and other donations and contributions was by making the donors list public in Jewish newspapers and or by hanging the lists in the synagogues, ‘so that all know them’.²⁰

The board was also in charge of ensuring the proper functioning of the other community organizations – primarily schools and charities – including concerning their finances. This is reflected, for example, in the act of 15 March 1931, regarding the request made by the director of the AIU school for an increase in the subsidy paid to the institution,²¹ and the efforts involving Isaac Nahon, the pakid (clerk) of the Talmud Torah Mohar Habekulot, to deliver the required funds to the board after his resignation in 1934. In the latter case, the Junta agreed to appoint a commission to take the necessary steps to resolve the matter. That same month, the board also discussed the state of abandonment of the Yagdil Torah school.²² In addition to assisting the community’s educational institutions, the Junta also attended to the medical needs of the poor that involved hospitalization, reaching an agreement, for example, with Benchimol Hospital in Tangier, as Tetouan’s civil hospital did not admit the most impoverished Jews.²³

Relations with other Jewish communities

Two other sources of revenue relied on the activation of social and community networks beyond Tetouan: the public subscriptions for building significant facilities, like cemeteries and synagogues, and donations and wills. Those networks comprised the other Sephardic communities in the Spanish Protectorate and Tetouan’s émigrés in the Spanish cities of Ceuta and Melilla, Gibraltar, and South America.²⁴ The Jewish communities in the Spanish Protectorate zone of Morocco were, for the most part, Sephardic.²⁵ The perception held by the Tetouan Junta regarding the organization of the other Sephardic north Moroccan communities was ‘traditional’. When the Spanish reorganized its Protectorate’s institutional and social bodies, including the establishment of rabbinic judicial demarcations, the community board asked that those delimitations be determined according to the traditional form of community organization, that is, a rabbinic judicial demarcation for each existing communal council.²⁶

Beyond the Spanish Protectorate zone, the other communities that frequently were asked for help, through exceptional contributions to build community facilities, were in nearby Ceuta and Melilla. The communities in these two Spanish enclaves in North Morocco, which were former Spanish garrisons, attracted not only the poorest Jews from Tetouan but also a large number of wealthy merchants after the cities became free ports in 1863. The first Jews from Tetouan to settle in Ceuta and Melilla included merchants, bankers, scholars, and philanthropists. For example, José Salama Hachuel (Tetouan 1862-Melilla 1912) settled in Melilla in 1870 after his father’s death, taking charge of all the family businesses and becoming the most prestigious merchant and banker in the city. In Ceuta, Isaac D. Levy (Tetouan 1871-Ceuta 1930) was a respected scholar who became the first Spanish-Hebrew Talmud Torah school director there. Yamín Benarroch Benzaquén (Tetouan 1883-Barcelona 1980), merchant and philanthropist, allocated part of his great fortune to charitable works to the benefit of both Jews and non-Jews in Melilla. To this day, he is one of the most recognized and favourite adopted sons of that Spanish enclave.²⁷

Jews from Tetouan were among the principal founders of the Jewish community of Gibraltar as well, having moved there after Great Britain took possession of the Rock in the eighteenth century.²⁸ As noted above, Jews from Tetouan also settled in various cities in southern Spain and Madrid beginning in the second half of the nineteenth century, in addition to emigrating to South America, particularly Argentina, Venezuela, and Brazil and, to a lesser extent, to Portugal, France, and England. After the creation of the State of Israel, some of Tetouan’s Jews settled in the new Jewish state as well. The twentieth-century history of the Jews of Tetouan cannot be understood without taking these migrations into account since interactions between the Jews in the city and the Tetouan Jewish diaspora were quite close during the first half of the twentieth century. Relationships were remarkably fluid with Ceuta and Melilla, Gibraltar, and South America. The Circumcisions Registry Book provides some idea of this map of migration networks. According to López Álvarez, of the parents of the children circumcised in Tetouan from 1881 to 1940, 33 were residents of Venezuela, particularly Caracas, 21 lived in Brazil, 19 in Ceuta, 11 in Gibraltar, 7 in Argentina, mainly Buenos Aires, and 5 were residents of mainland Spain.²⁹ The fact that these émigrés returned to Tetouan to circumcise their sons is evidence of the enduring bonds with their former home.

These networks, as noted above, played a vital role in the financing of the community infrastructure. In the case of Tetouan, the major construction for which the Junta mobilized these local and international networks during this period was the Jewish cemetery wall. Moreover, as the wealthiest members started to move out of the mellah to the Spanish-built part of the city, a new neighbourhood designed with wide avenues and modern buildings, the need to build some communal facilities (starting with a mikveh) in the newly extended area known as the Ensanche soon became clear as well to the Junta members.³⁰ However, the networks did not always produce the expected results, particularly when the communities in the Spanish Protectorate, Ceuta and Melilla were involved, as they were often also collecting funds for their own infrastructure needs and, likewise, requesting assistance from the other communities, and, therefore not able to help out at a given time.³¹

As noted above, another important source of revenue for the Jewish community of Tetouan, administered by the Junta, came from wills and donations from residents of the community or émigrés from Tetouan who had made their fortunes abroad.³² Between 1929 and 1946, the Junta managed several legacies. One, from the Garzón family, was earmarked for the construction of a much-needed Jewish hospital in Tetouan, the Garzón Hospital, for which a new commission was nominated by the board.³³ Another substantial legacy, this time from Gibraltar, came from the will of Salomon Levy. The Levy family were a wealthy Jewish family from Tetouan that settled in Gibraltar in the early 1700s. The terms of Salomon Levy’s testament established that it was to benefit the poor of the Jewish community of Tetouan. This legacy gave the communal board many headaches during the 1930s, as the will’s administrators, particularly Isaac A. Levy,³⁴ repeatedly refused to deliver the amounts requested from the legacy by the community board. On various occasions, the board commissioned some of its members to travel to Gibraltar to deal directly with the administrators regarding the legacy issue, but with little success. The problem derived from the terms of the will, which explicitly stated that the legacy was for the ‘poor of Tetouan’ and not for the ‘community fund’, which led the executors to resist the requests from the Junta. In 1935, ‘to provide a quick solution to the matter’, Jacob Benady, Levy Cohen, Salomón Serfaty, and David Sananes were sent to Gibraltar on behalf of the communal board again, with full powers to ‘carry out whatever they deem necessary for the resolution of the subject’.³⁵

While the limits of Tetouan’s Jewish community were extended in practical and symbolic terms through the network of the émigrés from that city, there was always a more diffuse symbolic – and, at times, practical – extension towards Palestine, as well. Eretz Israel had long been a significant religious and intellectual reference point for Moroccan Judaism. Many of the rabbis sanctified in Morocco came from Palestine, such as Morocco’s most famous tzaddik, Rabbi Amram ben Diwan. According to legend, Rabbi ben Diwan was in the ancestors’ cave in Palestine when he received a message from God to go to Morocco.³⁶ The board was highly committed as well to cultural aspects related to the Jewish religion, such as the Hebrew language, particularly liturgical Hebrew. The main concern in this regard was the low qualification of the Hebrew teachers in several of the community’s educational institutions.³⁷

This connection with Palestine reached a turning point when European Zionism was introduced into the north of Morocco by Rabbi Yudah León Jalfón (?-Tetouan 1966) – president of the High Rabbinic Tribunal of Tetouan during most of the Protectorate years – at the beginning of the twentieth century.³⁸ In 1929, the Junta decided to subscribe to the Zionist-oriented periodical Renacimiento de Israel (Israel’s Rebirth), published in Tangier since 1924 under founding director Asher Perl, a Polish Jew.³⁹ Most of the board members, though, were not enthusiastic about either Zionism or Perl’s journal, and, apparently, neither were the contributing members of the Jewish community of Tetouan. In early autumn 1931, when the board received a letter from the paying members of the community asking that the subsidy dedicated to the periodical be cancelled, it generated considerable debate. Most questioned the need to continue to subsidize the periodical for economic and political reasons. There were eight votes in favour of ending the subscription and two against it. Finally, the Junta agreed that, due to the financial situation of the community funds, the board was no longer going to support the periodical. After that, one of the few supporters of Zionism at that time in Tetouan, Jaime Vidal Israel, left the Junta.⁴⁰

The solidarity of Tetouan’s Jews extended beyond their Sephardic brethren from the north of Morocco, the network of émigrés, and the symbolically intense but practically more diffuse spiritual bond with Eretz Israel. Indeed, the Jews on the Junta felt a moral obligation to assist their co-religionists beyond these networks in some exceptional situations. For instance, they demonstrated their sense of ethnic solidarity with the Jews who fled Nazi Germany in 1933, with those who suffered during the repression that followed the military fascist uprising in Spain in 1936, and with the persecuted Jews in Nazi-occupied Europe during World War II.

Soon after Adolf Hitler rose to power in Germany, the Junta started to receive petitions for help from German Jews.⁴¹ In 1933, the board agreed to write to Ignacio Bauer Landauer, an influential Spanish Jew, regarding the difficulties affecting the German Jews living in the Protectorate, some of whom were doctors. Unfortunately, the efforts made on behalf of the Germans with the Spanish authorities were not successful.⁴² As the Spanish authorities were reluctant to give them proper visas, they could not live and work there. The Junta also organized collections on behalf of the Jews from Germany.⁴³ They showed their solidarity with the Polish Jews as well after some delegates visited Tetouan ‘to raise funds to help the Jews of Warsaw, especially the Talmide-Hajamim and schoolchildren who are faint from lack of food’. Again, since the community fund did not have the means to respond to this new emergency, the board proposed to collect donations from the community’s notables.⁴⁴

The best-known case of ethnic-humanitarian mobilization from this period was the Junta’s intercession with the Spanish authorities in the Protectorate to obtain visas to allow 500 Jewish children trapped in Nazi-occupied Hungary to enter Tangier, occupied by Spanish troops from 1940:

Mr President informed those gathered of the arrangements being made to obtain visas from the honourable Spanish Authorities, permitting the entry into Tangier of 500 Jewish minors of both genders coming from Hungary, whose first written petition was answered by His Excellency the High Commissioner in satisfactory terms; consequently those gathered spontaneously expressed their gratitude in light of the humanitarian course of action of His Excellency.⁴⁵

Relations with the Spaniards (and other Europeans)

Nineteenth-century French, Spanish, British, and other European colonists sought to use the Jewish elites for their colonial ambitions in Morocco. They relied on the Jews as business intermediaries, translators, and consular assistants. Many Jews who could take advantage of the situation benefitted from this opportunity, although this did not generally apply to the poorer Moroccan Jews. Nevertheless, particularly in urban areas, as noted, the underprivileged Jews also benefited from the impact of colonialism through access to Western education, thanks to the Anglo-Jewry and Alliance Israélite Universelle schools. According to Norman Stillman, this education gave Moroccan Jews a new sense of themselves, fresh rising expectations, and the advantage of opportunity over the largely uneducated Muslim masses, when what Emanuel Wallerstein has called the ‘World Economic System’ was extending throughout the Middle East and the Maghreb.⁴⁶ From that time on, the Jews in Morocco – primarily in the urban areas and led by the new commercial elites – embarked upon a process of Westernization. This modernization was regarded with a degree of suspicion by the more conservative religious sectors, but not as intensely as amongst the Muslim orthodoxy in the country. In the northern cities, this process was spearheaded by Tangier, although Tetouan, Ksar-el-Kebir, and the other smaller cities soon followed. However, the impact of modernization was uneven between the coastal cities, the inland cities, and the rural areas, on the one hand, and between the better-off elites living in the new European neighbourhoods and the inhabitants of more modest means living in the mellahs.⁴⁷

This process of European colonial penetration culminated in 1912 when Morocco became a French-Spanish Protectorate. The Spanish Protectorate zone constituted a narrow strip in the north, with the city of Tetouan as its capital, and some small enclaves in the south, former Spanish fisheries. The colonial apparatus applied in Morocco, which was based on a concept of ‘indirect government’ that sought to maintain the appearance of continuity in local institutions in order to better control them, had a considerable impact on Moroccan society.⁴⁸ In theory, the French and Spanish established the Protectorate to reform native institutions rather than replace them, and they institutionalized the existing community structures.⁴⁹ The reorganization of the institutions of the Moroccan Jewish communities was the culmination of a process that began with the intervention of both foreign governments and European Jewish organizations. In this way, traditional authority structures survived, albeit with some critical changes, and the cultural and symbolic segregation between Muslims and Jews became institutionalized on a new basis. The bureaucratization and subordination of Jewish institutions by the French and Spanish authorities was, nevertheless, far-reaching, and the colonizers continued with new measures related to centralization and surveillance throughout the Protectorates. At the same time, certain mechanisms were put into place to incorporate Muslims and Jews into government and the administration of local affairs. In the Spanish Protectorate, the two groups had community representatives in the new local government organizations under colonial authority, the municipal Juntas. The number of, and structures used to appoint, Muslim and Jewish members varied according to the political context, but they were always proposed by the communities themselves.⁵⁰

Most Jews welcomed the creation of the Protectorates and they took both practical and symbolic positions on the side of the Europeans. Initially, this only affected the elites, as they increasingly identified culturally more with the Europeans than Muslim Moroccans, and were identified as such in turn. However, during the Protectorate, this extended to other groups as well, especially during the years of the Spanish Second Republic. For example, in 1931, the communal board requested the transfer of Jewish inmates serving a sentence in an ‘indigenous jail’ to the ‘European jail’, regardless of whether or not they were Moroccan subjects.⁵¹ The ‘indigenous’ or ‘Moorish’ jail was for Moroccan subjects, Muslims or Jews, while the ‘European’ or ‘Spanish’ jail was set aside for non-Moroccan subjects, regardless of religious affiliation.

As a social body integrated into the colonial system, the Jewish community of Tetouan, through its board, also received some funding for social services and charities from the municipal and Protectorate authorities. Thus, for example, the Local Board of Social Charity Action supported the community’s workhouse, and the municipality helped with Jewish and Muslim cultural and religious festivals, such as Rosh Hashanah. The Protectorate authorities also assisted the Jewish community of Tetouan economically. For example, when the municipality of Seville demanded a payment of 125,000 pesetas for the land occupied by the Jewish cemetery in that city, the Protectorate authorities handled the matter (as most of the members of the Jewish community of Seville were from Tetouan and Tangier). Thus, although the communal and rabbinic leadership became part of the apparatus of colonial Morocco, the newly constituted organs gave the communal and, significantly, rabbinic leadership greater power than ever before, expanding its influence in each Protectorate.⁵² Consequently, each community had to take care of their people, and the municipality and Protectorate authorities demanded the Jewish community board’s intervention when necessary, such as during an outbreak of scabies in an indigenous jail, where the Moroccan Jewish prisoners continued to serve their sentences, despite the efforts of the Junta, as they had not acquired Spanish citizenship or citizenship from any other Western country. The outbreak of scabies affected forty inmates, eight of them Jews, and doctors advised burning all their clothes. The Spanish authorities urgently called the communal council to provide the Jewish inmates with new attire.⁵³

The policies of the Protectorate, which preserved the precolonial social structure, and the different Spanish approach to Jewish communities depending on their location, gave the Junta a privileged position compared to other Jewish community boards in Spain. During the early years of Franco’s dictatorship, when the situation for the Jewish communities in Ceuta, Melilla, and mainland Spain worsened considerably, the Jewish communities in Spanish Morocco, protected by the colonial umbrella, were an exception.⁵⁴ Moreover, the Jews in the Protectorate maintained close, fluid relations with the Franco authorities, which included the inestimable assistance of the bankers in the Spanish zone of the Protectorate and Tangier, who supported and financed Franco’s military uprising.⁵⁵

On several occasions, the community board in Tetouan acted as an advocate for its Sephardic brethren, particularly in Ceuta and Melilla. For example, in 1944, the Junta interceded on behalf of Moroccan Jews imprisoned in the Peninsula, requesting that they be transferred to Oued-Lau prison, near Tetouan: ‘ … Mr President reported that he had asked the Most Excellent Mr Secretary-General to issue an order to move the Moroccan Jews serving time in prisons to Oued-Lau, which was likewise answered in satisfactory terms; consequently the gratitude of this Board for this approval is recorded, since with it these convicts can be closer to their families’.⁵⁶ The following year, they interceded for the restitution of the Talmud Torah building in Melilla, which Franco’s supporters had taken after the military uprising of 1936.⁵⁷ However, the Jews in the Protectorate were also victims of repression, especially during the early years, but, as in the Peninsula, Ceuta and Melilla, they were not persecuted because they were Jews, but because of their activism in Republican or left-wing parties or their participation in Freemasonry. Additionally, as in the Peninsula, anti-Jewish violence during the first years of the War was committed by Falangist groups and, as it was not associated with politics or Freemasonry, this violence was contained and sporadic. One example is the arrest of Esther Serruya Assor, known as ‘the Red Venus’, in 1937. An antifascist, communist militant from Tangier, she was detained in Tetouan, where she had supposedly been spying on the rebel army, and taken to Ceuta where she was executed in the fort of Hacho. The extensive, detailed documentation in her file in the Military History Archive in Ceuta does not contain anti-Jewish language, despite the fact that she was recognized as a Jew. At the beginning of the War, Serruya had converted to Catholicism, adopting the Catholic name Ana Teresa, and joined the Falange, allegedly in order to work as a spy.⁵⁸

During the Protectorate, the community leaders were also required to use Spanish for their communal records, particularly the Minutes Book (see note 7). Before the creation of the Protectorate, the Sephardic Jews in Morocco spoke a sort of mix of Old Spanish, Hebrew, and Arabic unique to this part of the world and known as Haketia, a language that was written using Hebrew script. In addition to the formal requirements made by the Spanish Protectorate authorities regarding the use of modern Spanish written using Latin letters for the community’s official documents, according to Nina Pinto-Abecasis, because of the affinity that the Jews in this zone felt for their Spanish Protector, along with their desire – particularly among the elites – to identify with Spanish culture, Haketia was relegated to secondary status and was eventually dropped altogether. This occurred not only in formal circumstances and public spaces, but also within families, who chose to communicate in modern Spanish in an attempt to remove any element that could create a barrier between themselves and the Spanish Protectorate.⁵⁹ However, other records related to religious tradition, such as circumcisions or burials, continued to be written in Hebrew, with Spanish alongside it. In addition to the rise in the compulsory (and voluntary) use of the Spanish language, other Spanish practices increased during the colonial years, especially during the dictatorship of Francisco Franco. For example, the Spanish pattern of using two family names – the father’s and the mother’s – was broadly adopted by the men and women of the Jewish community of Tetouan. Moreover, a trend that dated back to the nineteenth century, the Hispanicization of given names, increased, particularly in the case of women.⁶⁰ Men more often used a substitute Spanish name in place of their Hebrew name, as seen in the example of Levy Cohen, a Junta member from 1933 to 1941. Cohen gradually replaced Levy with Luis until he only used the latter name.⁶¹

The Hispanicization process also permeated French culture amongst the Jews of northern Morocco. Despite being a Judeo-French institution, for instance, the AIU schools in the Spanish Protectorate were required to have Spanish teachers, who received their salaries from the Spanish state.⁶² However, this Hispanicization affected the members of the community in different ways. While the new professional, industrial and commercial elites now living alongside the well-off Spanish colonial elites in the new city, the Ensanche,⁶³ underwent a process of intensive acculturation, for people with a lower level of education and fewer resources, most of whom lived in the old mellah, Haketia continued to be the dominant language.⁶⁴ In any event, after the coup d’état, the education system and study programmes in the Protectorate were reformed, affecting both the Muslim and Jewish schools, advancing the Arabization process in the former and religious education and Hebrew (along with Spanish) in the latter at the secondary level, with the creation of the Maimonides Institute in Tetouan.⁶⁵

In other instances, the Spanish-Christian framework was prevalent. For example, Spanish teachers at the AIU schools refused to work on Sundays. The weekly Sunday (Christian) rest laws applied to Spanish civil servants in the Protectorate as well. For the Jews, that meant that students received no schooling on either Saturday or Sunday. This situation upset both the school director and the community board.⁶⁶ The Junta was also concerned because the elections in the municipality, in which Jews participated, were held on Saturday, their day of rest:

The Secretary informed about the municipal elections and, as it was impossible to hold them on the day indicated by the Authorities, as it fell on a Saturday, they agreed to hold them on 28 September, a weekday, designating the locale of the Nedaba as the only polling station … it was also agreed to respond to the Local Intervention Office, indicating the date change for the election, as well as the community’s displeasure regarding the low number of candidates designated in the Municipality.

The proposal by the Spanish authorities to reform the calendar was also of concern, especially to the President of the High Rabbinic Tribunal of Tetouan and the community board, since ‘it is our duty to ensure the stillness of the שבת and religious holidays’.⁶⁷

Ethnic boundaries can also be viewed by observing the image that the community board wanted to project to others, that is, the ideal image by which they wished to be viewed by outsiders. In Tetouan, the community leadership was very aware of what they needed to represent to outsiders and, conversely, what they needed to avoid. Therefore, they maintained good relations with both the Muslim and Spanish authorities. On behalf of the Jews of the city, for example, the board attended formal protocol acts involving those authorities, one example being a military parade in honour of the Spanish army forces that occupied Ifni, on the Atlantic coast south of Morocco, in 1935.⁶⁸ However, these ‘others’ were not homogeneous. There were a variety of ‘others’, and the approach with regard to protocol varied widely, sometimes, strikingly so. For example, the Junta never proposed that any Muslim authorities be registered in the Golden Book of the Jewish National Fund (Keren Kayemet LeIsrael), created by Theodor Herzl in 1901 to buy land in Palestine, although they did propose some Spanish authorities for this recognition, such as the High Commissioner of the Spanish Protectorate, Conde de Jordana (1928–31), and Diego Saavedra y Magdalena, Director-General of Morocco and Colonies of Spain (1928–30).⁶⁹

The board members were equally concerned about Jewish beggars from the French zone causing problems in Tetouan, primarily because it was ‘embarrassing’ and they should not be allowed outside the mellah. They agreed to create a charity soup kitchen supported by a monthly subscription paid by the Jewish merchants so that the beggars would not have to enter the Jewish shops in the ‘European zone’ (the ‘Spanish Ensanche’), bothering the customers and creating an undesirable image of the Jews.⁷⁰ Again, in 1933, Jewish begging in the streets of the Ensanche of Tetouan emerged as an issue. Jacob Garzón reported having been called by the Secretary of Local Intervention, who lamented the ‘unpleasant spectacle that the Hebrew beggars present’. Abraham Bengualid argued that it was necessary to resolve the begging and ‘avoid the embarrassing images that foreign beggars present at all times’. Again the soup kitchen and the charity work done within the mellah seemed the best solution to take the beggars off the streets and project an optimal image of the community towards the ‘others’ – primarily the Spaniards, and much less so the Muslims.⁷¹

Relations with Moroccan Muslims

Alongside the Sephardic-Spanish convergence during the years of the Protectorate was a parallel Jewish-Muslim divergence in Morocco. The aqd al-dhimma, which established the status of non-Muslims under Muslim rule, mediated Muslim-Jewish relations in precolonial Morocco. It was a contract between non-Muslims and the Muslim ruler that allowed the non-believers to remain in dar al-Islam under the protection of the Muslim governors. The non-believers had to accept submission to the ruler and pay a special tax, the jizya. Morocco’s Jews were the only religious minority subjected to the dhimma in the nineteenth century, as the Christians had been expelled or forcibly converted in the Middle Ages. The process of modernization, which began with the intensification of mercantile relations between the western European powers and the Islamic world at the end of the eighteenth century, had a profound impact on both Muslims and Jews. However, unlike the Ottoman Empire, Morocco did not formally abolish the dhimma.⁷²

Of the diverse measures adopted by the Moroccan sultans to encourage the English, Spanish, French, Dutch and other merchants to increase trade with Morocco, the most notable was the creation of a port at Essaouira on the Atlantic coast, which controlled more than 50 percent of Morocco’s maritime trade for a good part of the nineteenth century.⁷³ Because of the inaccuracies in many of the trade treaties signed with Morocco since the late eighteenth century, there was pressure from Europe to put many of the Moroccan subjects involved in trade with the Europeans or their consular representations under foreign consular protection, using the excuse of protecting European trade against the arbitrary nature of the Muslim authorities. This consular protection favoured members of the emerging Muslim and Jewish bourgeoisie in the country. Securely supported by their respective diplomatic legations, the consular protégées stayed beyond the reach of the taxation and justice of the Moroccan government and state (makhzen), which only loosely opposed these practices so as not to provoke demonstrations of military might by the colonial powers.⁷⁴ This Western pressure contributed to the deterioration of the political and economic situation in Morocco, which then led to the imposition of the French and Spanish Protectorates in 1912.

Unlike the Jews, the Muslims resisted colonial penetration, and the Spanish and French had to struggle to control armed resistance in the more remote areas of their territories. As a result, the Protectorate was not fully pacified by the colonial authorities until 1927. At that point, national identity became the key concept around which the reaction against colonialism by Moroccan Muslims took shape, especially beginning in 1930 with the enactment of the so-called ‘Berber dahir’ by the authorities in the French Protectorate, which established the pre-eminence of common law in rural areas, largely populated by the Amazighs, to the detriment of Islamic law. This dahir provoked an essentially religious reaction throughout the Arab world, but its most important consequence was the creation of a point of convergence for the emerging Moroccan nationalism. As a result, Moroccan nationalism erupted as a force in the country’s politics. While this was severely repressed and punished in the French zone, the Spanish authorities preferred to pursue a more tolerant – yet equally controlling – policy to enlist the support of Muslim elites, meaning that nationalists were more openly active in the north, especially in Tetouan, where they were led by the urban bourgeoisie of Andalusi descent, with Abdelkhalek Torres heading the National Reform Party (Hizb Al-Islah Al-Wataní).⁷⁵

The Jewish community board in the city was not unaware of the rise of Moroccan nationalism, but, regardless of individual preferences, as a board, they did not show excessive interest in or concern about the Moroccan Muslims’ nationalist project. On the contrary, the Junta was more interested in maintaining the internal segregated operation of the community as in the precolonial period, particularly when Muslim institutions were involved. Even before the creation of the Protectorates, the community leaders always tried to resolve Jewish claims within the community. A plurality of jurisdictions was a characteristic of precolonial Morocco that expanded with the introduction of consular jurisdiction, first, and then the jurisdiction of the Protectorate powers.⁷⁶ During the Protectorate, although the Jews had their own courts, their powers were limited to religious issues and personal statutes. Therefore, when in March 1931, Jacob Garzón, as head of the Hevra Kadishah (Jewish Burial Society), informed the Junta that he had been summoned before the Qadi (Sharia court magistrate) by Jaime Benolol, who was claiming land in the cemetery that Garzón considered property of the community. The board members agreed that the president would discuss the subject with Benolol ‘until an agreement is reached without an outside authority taking part in a dispute between a member of the Community and the Community’.⁷⁷

The lack of interest in and identification with the Moroccan national project was likely the result of a number of factors: the marked Islamist orientation of Moroccan nationalism; the identity-based affinities of the Jews in Tetouan; the political context of the time, with the increased tensions between Muslims and Jews in Palestine, which were felt strongly amongst the nationalists in North Morocco; and nationalist flirtations with antisemitism through some members of the German colony in Tetouan. However, despite the fact that there were clear tensions around this question in Tetouan in the 1930s, as discussed below, the Minutes Books of the community board do not reflect either concern or hostility towards Moroccan nationalism.

Perhaps the word that best describes how Moroccan nationalism appears in the Junta records is ‘indifference’. The progressive Hispanicization and modernization of the Tetouan Jews, led by the commercial and industrial elites who had left the mellah to live in the new Spanish neighbourhood of the Ensanche, followed far behind by the rest of the community, contributed to reducing day-to-day relationships with the Muslim population. These relationships had been responsible for the incorporation of words and expressions from the Moroccan Arabic dialect into Haketia, a demonstration of the close relationships between Muslims and Jews in North Morocco during the precolonial period.⁷⁸ In 1937, after an interview with some Muslim notables, board member Jaime Benolol explained to the Junta that a Muslim commission had told him of the need for Jewish children to learn ‘the language of the Country where we live’. Mose Sananes answered that ‘our community fund is not in a position to cover this expense; first we must attend to our poor who are not cared for as they should be’. Jacob Garzón proposed to organize a collection and contribute a sum of money of his own. After a lengthy discussion, the members agreed to pay a maximum of 100 pesetas a month to an Arabic teacher.⁷⁹

Violent acts against the Jewish minority in Tetouan by Muslims were not the norm, but they happened from time to time. Before the rise of nationalism in Morocco, traditional forms of prejudice and social hierarchies derived from the dhimma had fed some degree of violence. Jews were despised, considered inferior, and expected to behave submissively towards Muslims. Traditional anti-Judaism, exacerbated by the changes in the social order brought by colonialism, inspired the desecration of the Jewish cemetery and the harassment of funeral processions. That, in addition to Muslim vandalism, led to the construction of the cemetery wall. The community also bought a hearse to transfer the dead to their place of burial.⁸⁰ However, other occasional violent attacks against the Jews of Morocco fell outside the framework of traditional anti-Judaism and into the framework of anticolonialism and Moroccan Muslims’ perceptions about the Hispano-Jewish convergence. One such example took place in Ksar el-Kebir (another major Jewish settlement in the Spanish Protectorate) in July 1933 when Jewish students put on a play about the Arab conquest of Spain, triggering attacks by Muslims, who considered the performance a provocation, against Jews and Spaniards in some cafés in that city.⁸¹ These years also witnessed the distribution of anti-Semitic propaganda in North Morocco by German residents affiliated with the Nazi Party, although it had little impact.⁸² This propaganda would be replicated by the Falangists in the Protectorate and Tangier during the Spanish Civil War in an attempt, like the Nazis, to increase tensions between Muslims and Jews. In a radical political twist, Abdelkhalek Torres himself, a nationalist, Freemason and antifascist activist, became affiliated with the Falange, even creating his own version, the Moroccan Nationalist Falange (Al-Fityan) and parading alongside the procession of the khalifa (the representative of the sultan in the Spanish Protectorate) on the occasion of the holiday of Eid al-Adha.⁸³

During World War II, Vichy France extended its antisemitic laws to its colonies, where the French civil servants and colonists supported them. The Muslim reaction towards antisemitism, particularly among the nationalists, varied from total rejection – as it was a product of the colonists – to incorporating an antisemitic discourse in a new context. During the 1940s, as the conflict between Muslims and Jews in Palestine intensified, it was not uncommon to find articles reproducing European antisemitic discourses and stereotypes in Morocco’s nationalist press, such as the daily al-῾Alam. The publication of articles on the situation in Palestine, with accusations against the Moroccan Jews of supporting Zionism, may not be surprising in this context. However, the emergence of new stereotypes and unprecedented antisemitic speech into the traditional Moroccan anti-Jewish imaginary, such as accusations against Zionists of wanting to ‘conquer the whole world’ and lacking ‘true beliefs and ideals’, is noteworthy.⁸⁴

Conclusion

… it takes at least two somethings to create a difference … real or imagined … Clearly, each alone is – for the mind and perception – a non-entity a non-being.

(Gregory Bateson, Mind and Nature, 1979)

Although ethnic identity and culture constitute ideal abstract reference points, they are alive and put into practice, more or less consciously, in everyday interactions between people. They depend on context and the individual and group decisions made in the face of this context – whether social, political, economic, or cultural – and as such, they are always historical and based on relationships. In this respect, the role of the Junta of the Jewish community in Tetouan during the colonial period was very important, marked as it was by profound changes that had a major impact on Moroccan Jews.

The Jewish Junta in Tetouan during those years adopted the ‘traditional’ role of keeping the group together, while deciding how to act in the face of the many challenges in the changing context. It oversaw a community that maintained intense relationships with other Sephardic settlements, not only in the Spanish Protectorate, but also in Ceuta and Melilla, Gibraltar, and with the members who had emigrated to South America, creating transnational networks of financial assistance, especially from Tetouan’s emigrants. Those relationships expanded the community borders of ‘Jewish Tetouan’. Other Jewish networks beyond Tetouan included the – practically weak but symbolically unshakable – bond with Eretz Israel. Jews of French Morocco and other parts of the world came into the picture when they were in need, activating sleeping ethnic ties.

One of the characteristics of the colonial period in Morocco was that, while the existing socio-religious divisions were institutionalized on new bases, reinforcing community boundaries, new references and cultural, economic, and political possibilities were incorporated, increasing mobility and, paradoxically, blurring or redrawing ethnic borders. This situation contributed to the continued cohesion and solidarity of Tetouan’s Jewish community while opening new possibilities, beginning with the movement of the wealthiest members out of the old Jewish mellah to live amongst non-Jewish neighbours. Starting with those elites, the Jewish community of Tetouan initiated a process of cultural convergence towards the Spanish colonizers, all while distancing themselves from their Muslim fellow countrymen. Nevertheless, despite the bridges, which in the case of the Spaniards included the incorporation of cultural practices, the ethnic boundary persisted. Proof of that was the image that the community board wanted to project towards the ‘others’ – particularly the Spaniards – of themselves, an ideal that contrasted with the many hardships and challenges (but also opportunities) that the Jewish community of Tetouan experienced during those years.

It is extremely challenging to recover the memory and cultural inheritance of twentieth-century Jewish Tetouan and of so many other Jewish spaces, now empty, in North Africa, without essentializing or reifying it. However, showing the flow of people, identities, processes, positions, and roles highlights how ethnic identity and culture live in people whose decisions, in turn, imbue them with new content, even if, as Barth notes, the ethnic boundaries persist.

Acknowledgements

This study received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme under Marie Sklodowska-Curie grant agreement No. 745752.

I would also like to thank the two anonymous reviewers for their detailed, constructive comments, which doubtless improved this article, particularly regarding the level of detail about specific important points in it.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Maite Ojeda-Mata

Maite Ojeda-Mata is a Lecturer at the Department of Sociology and Social Anthropology, Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Valencia, Spain. She was previously a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellow at The Parkes Institute, University of Southampton, United Kingdom. Before that, she worked as a researcher and lecturer at Pompeu Fabra and Autonoma de Barcelona universities. She specializes in historical-anthropological research on the historical-political conditions in which socio-political identities are defined and redefined, naturalization and citizenship, migrations and diasporas, and popular religion. She is the author of Modern Spain and the Sephardim: Legitimizing Identities (Lexington Books, 2018), and the co-editor of Judíos entre Europa y el norte de África, siglos XV-XXI (Bellaterra, 2013).

Notes

1. ‘Amigas judías tuvimos que de solteras le pidieron un novio a San Antonio, y amigas moras que te hablaban de Miriam -la Virgen María- y del Arcángel San Gabriel, y cristianas, mi vida, que por matar al marido invocaban a la Aixa Candisha’ (all translations from Spanish in this text are mine).

2. Among these initiatives was the one from the Tetouan City Council and the Autonomous Regional Government of Andalusia in Spain, with the participation of the Judeo-Moroccan Cultural Heritage Foundation, to rehabilitate the beautiful Ben Walid Synagogue in 2001.

3. See, for example, Issachar Ben-Ami, Culte Des Saints et Pèlerinages Judéo-Musulmans Au Maroc (Paris: Maisonneuve & Larose, 1990); Alvar Manuel, El Judeo-Español: II Romancero Sefardí de Marruecos (Madrid: Universidad de Alcalá, 2003); Vanessa Paloma Elbaz, “De Tu Boca a Los Cielos: Jewish Women’s Songs in Northern Morocco,” Hespéris-Tamuda 51, no. 3 (2016): 239–61; Susana Weich-Shahak, Romancero Sefardí de Marruecos (Madrid: Alpuerto, 2019).

4. Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis and London, 1996). George E Marcus, “Ethnography in/of the World System: The Emergence of Multi-Sited Ethnography,” Annual Review of Anthropology 24 (1995): 95–117; Ulf Hannerz, Transnational Connections: Culture, People, Places (London and New York: Routledge, 1996).

5. Fredrik Barth, “Introduction,” in Ethnic Groups and Boundaries: The Social Organization of Culture Difference (Oslo etc.: Universitetsforlaget, 1969).

6. Steven E. Aschheim, “German History and German Jewry. Boundaries, Junctions and Interdependence,” Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook 43, no. 315–322 (1998).

7. The copy consulted for this study is a limited edition of the Libro de Actas del Consejo Comunal Israelita de Tetuán, 1929–1946 (‘Minutes Book of the Israelite Community of Tetouan, 1929–1946ʹ; hereinafter MB), printed in 2016 by Salomon A. Benatar Amrán. The acts have not been transcribed; they are direct copies from the originals. The language and alphabet used to write the Minutes Books was modern Spanish. On the linguistic uses of the Jewish population in Tetouan during the Protectorate, see also notes 59 to 64.

8. Pedro Antonio de Alarcón, Diario de Un Testigo de La Guerra de África (Madrid: Gaspar y Roig, 1859); Uriel Macías Kapón, “Los Cronistas de La Guerra de África y El Primer Reencuentro Con Los Sefardíes,” in Los Judíos En La España Contemporánea : Historia y Visiones, 1898–1998, ed. Uriel Macías Kapón, Yolanda Moreno Koch, and Ricardo Izquierdo Benito (Cuenca: Ediciones de la Universidad de Castilla-La Mancha, 2000), 45–60. Although the Jewish presence in Tetouan began after their expulsion from the Iberian kingdoms in the Early Modern Age, and, therefore, like the Muslim elites in the city, they are of Iberian descent, the mellah or ‘Jewish quarter’, where they lived when the Spanish arrived in the mid-nineteenth century was created at the beginning of that century to remove the Jews from the medina, where they were living near the great mosque (Santiago Sebastián, “Notas Sobre El Urbanismo de Tetuán,” REVL, no. 103 (1959): 72–80.)

9. Sarah Leibovici, Chronique Des Juifs de Tétouan 1860–1896, Collection Judaïsme En Terre d’Islam, vol. 3 (Paris: Editions Maisonneuve & Larose, 1984); Juan B. Vilar, Tetuán En El Resurgimiento Judío Contemporáneo, 1850–1870: Aproximación a La Historia Del Judaísmo Norteafricano (Caracas: Centro de Estudios Sefardíes de Caracas, 1985), 163; Ana María López Álvarez, La Comunidad Judía de Tetuán, 1881–1940: Onomástica y Sociología En El Libro de Registro de Circuncisiones Del Rabino Yishaq Bar Vidal Haserfaty, Colecciones Del Museo Sefardí (Madrid: Secretaría General Técnica, Ministerio de Educación, Cultura y Deporte, 2003), 359.

10. Ana María López Álvarez, “Tetuán y Los Judíos. La Vida Cotidiana En El Noticiero de Tetuán (16 de Agosto de 1860–13 de Febrero de 1861),” Akros, no. 4 (2004): 57–70.

11. Mohammed El Jetti, « Tétouan, Place de Rachat Des Captifs Aux XVIe et XVIIe Siècles, » Cahiers de La Méditerranée, no. 87 (2013): 147–58.

12. López Álvarez, La Comunidad Judía de Tetuán, 1881–1940: Onomástica y Sociología En El Libro de Registro de Circuncisiones Del Rabino Yishaq Bar Vidal Haserfaty, 364, 368–69.

13. Padrón de vecindad de 1894, quoted in José María Lázaro Bruña, “La Pequeña Comunidad Hebrea de La Línea (1856–1936),” Sefarad 80, no. 1 (2020): 203–61.

14. See, for example, MB, Acts of 1 January 1929 or 11 December 1933, among others. For other Moroccan communities see Jessica M. Marglin, “Poverty and Charity in a Moroccan City: A Study of Jewish Communal Leadership in Meknes, 1750–1912,” in Judaism and Islam: Religious, Scientific, and Cultural Dimensions (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2011), 299–323; Aviad Moreno, “An Insight into the Course of European-Oriented Modernization among Oriental Jewries: the Minutes Book of the Junta of Tangier,” El Prezente: Studies in Sephardic Culture 8, no. 9 (2015): 95–120.

15. José Benoliel, “Dialecto Judeo-Hispano-Marroquí o Hakitía,” Boletín de La Real Academia Española, 1962, 507–38. See also, for example, MB, Acts of 19 March and 19 November 1934, among others.

16. See, for example, MB, Acts of 21 January and 17 February 1929. The Jewish community of Tetouan already had a communal fund in the precolonial period that was financed by taxes on kosher meat (see Juan B. Vilar, La Judería de Tetuán (1489–1860) y Otros Ensayos (Murcia: Universidad de Murcia, 1969).

17. MB, Act of 26 December 1929.

18. See, for example, MB, Acts of 18 June 1929, 17 September 1933, and 19 November 1934.

19. On the nedabah see, for example, MB, Act of 5 September 1930.

20. See, for example, MB, Act of 29 March 1931.

21. See, for example, MB, Act of 15 March 1931.

22. MB, Act of 12 February 1934.

23. See, for example, MB of 29 March 1931.

24. Ana María López Álvarez, “La Comunidad Judía de Tetuán (1881–1940). Datos Sociológicos En El Libro Registro de Circuncisiones de R. Yishaq Bar Vidal Ha-Serfaty,” Espacio, Tiempo y Forma 13 (2000): 249.

25. Except for the remnants of tiny communities in the Rif, who shared Amazigh culture with their Muslim neighbours with whom they had lived for hundreds (Rif) or thousands (Atlas) of years. There is some debate regarding whether they were Berberized Jews or Judaized Berbers in the case of the Atlas, or Sephardic Berberized Jews in the case of the Rif. These rural communities were rapidly disappearing through migration to urban areas and assimilation into the dominant Sephardic culture. (Ignacio Bauer, “Les Israélites Dans Le Rif,” in Comptes Rendus Du Congrès International de Géographie de Amsterdam de 1938 (Leiden: Brill, 1938), 349–50.)

26. MB, Act of 3 November 1930.

27. Jesús F Salafranca Ortega, “Síntesis Histórica de La Población Judía de Melilla,” Aldaba 5 (1987): 55–70.

28. Tito Benady, “La Población Judía de Gibraltar Después Del 6 de Agosto de 1704,” Almoraima 34 (2007): 109–22.

29. López Álvarez, La Comunidad Judía de Tetuán, 1881–1940: Onomástica y Sociología En El Libro de Registro de Circuncisiones Del Rabino Yishaq Bar Vidal Haserfaty, 392–94.

30. MB, Act of 29 October 1931.

31. See, for example, MB, Acts of 28 October 1930, 15 September 1931, and 9 December 1930 on the construction of a synagogue in Puerto Capaz.

32. López Álvarez, “La Comunidad Judía de Tetuán (1881–1940). Datos Sociológicos En El Libro Registro de Circuncisiones de R. Yishaq Bar Vidal Ha-Serfaty,” 249.

33. MB, Act of 30 July 1933.

34. See, for example, MB, Act of 8 October 1929.

35. See, for example, MB, Acts of 15 September 1931, 22 November 1932, 4 and 11 December 1933, 8 May 1935, among others.

36. Ben-Ami, Culte Des Saints et Pèlerinages Judéo-Musulmans Au Maroc.

37. See, for example, MB Act of 19 March 1933.

38. Maite Ojeda-Mata, “The Sephardim of North Morocco, Zionism and Illegal Emigration to Israel through the Spanish Cities of Ceuta and Melilla,” Especial Issue: Jewish (In)Visibility in Iberia: A View from the Margins, Contemporary Jewry, 2021,

39. MB, Act of 4 November 1929.

40. See, MB, Acts from 15 September to 19 October 1931. See also, Ojeda-Mata.

41. MB, Act of 7 June 1933.

42. MB, Act of 17 September 1933.

43. MB, Acts of 10 and 30 July 1933.

44. MB, Act of 8 March 1933.

45. MB, Act of 28 and 29 June 1944.

46. Norman A. Stillman, “Judaism and Islam: Fourteen Hundred Years of Intertwined Destiny?” in The Convergence of Judaism and Islam, ed. Michael M. Laskier and Yaacov Lev (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2011), 10–22.

47. Jessica Marglin, “Modernizing Moroccan Jews: The AIU Alumni Association in Tangier, 1893–1913,” The Jewish Quarterly Review 101, no. 4 (2018): 574–603.

48. See, for exemple, José Antonio González Alcantud, Historia Colonial de Marruecos, 1894–1961 (Córdoba: Almuzara, 2019).

49. André Chouraqui, La Condition Juridique de l’Israélite Marocain (Paris: Presses du Livre Français, 1950), 122–29. Eloy Martín Corrales, “El Protectorado Español En Marruecos (1912–1956). Una Perspectiva Histórica,” in España En Marruecos, 1912–1956: Discursos Geográficos e Intervención Territorial, ed. Joan Nogué i Font and José Luis Villanova, vol. 1 (Lleida: Editorial Milenio, 1999), 145–58; Daniel J. Schroeter and Joseph Chetrit, “Emancipation and Its Discontents: Jews at the Formative Period of Colonial Rule in Morocco,” Jewish Social Studies 13, no. 1 (2006): 170–206.

50. Mohammed Ibn Azzuz Hakim, “La Administración Local de Marruecos Antes y Depués Del Protectorado,” Crónica Administrativa (1952): 261–79.

51. MB, Act of 29 March 1931.

52. Schroeter and Joseph Chetrit, “Emancipation and Its Discontents: Jews at the Formative Period of Colonial Rule in Morocco.”

53. MB, Act of 7 June 1946.

54. Maite Ojeda-Mata, Modern Spain and the Sephardim: Legitimizing Identities (New York; London; etc.: Lexington Books, 2018).

55. Eloy Martín Corrales, “Tensiones Judeo-Musulmanas En El Protectorado Español En Marruecos En Tiempos de La II República (1931–1936),” in Judíos Entre Europa y El Norte de África (Siglos XVI-XXI), ed. Eloy Martín Corrales and Maite Ojeda-Mata (Barcelona: Bellaterra, 2013), 93–118.

56. MB, Act of 29 June 1944.

57. MB, Act of 15 March 1945.

58. Archivo Intermedio Militar de Ceuta, Fondo 01–01, CG de ENA, Exp. 275/191. For an analysis of the case and contents of the file, see: Maite Ojeda-Mata, El sionismo y la emigración a Israel de los judíos marroquíes a través de los enclaves españoles del norte de Marruecos, 1948–1964 (Ceuta: Instituto de Estudios Ceutíes), forthcoming.

59. Nina Pinto-abecasis, “Functionality, Memory and Cultural Anchor: Back to the Haketia Language,” Ladinar, no. IX (2017): cxiii–cxxx; José Benoliel, “Dialecto Judeo-Hispano-Marroquí o Hakitía,” Boletín de La Real Academia Española, 1962, 507–38.

60. López Álvarez, “La Comunidad Judía de Tetuán (1881–1940). Datos Sociológicos En El Libro Registro de Circuncisiones de R. Yishaq Bar Vidal Ha-Serfaty”; Yaakov Bentolila, “The Register of the Jewish Burial Society in Tetuan,” in Studies in the History and Culture of North African Jewry, ed. Moshe Bar-Asher and Steven D. Fraade (New Haven: Yale University, 2011), 51–63.

61. MB, Acts from March 1933 to July 1941.

62. See, for example, MB, Act of 4 November 1929. See, also, Irene González González, “La Alianza Israelita Universal a Través Del Prisma Del Norte de Marruecos: Su Labor Educativa (1862–1912),” in Judíos Entre Europa y El Norte de África (Siglos XV-XXI), ed. Eloy Martín Corrales and Maite Ojeda-Mata (Barcelona: Bellaterra, 2013), 73–92. Despite proclamations of cultural proximity (including a shared ethnicity) between the Spaniards and Sephardic Jews, the paradoxical demand to ‘Hispanicize’ them has been a constant feature of the Spanish state’s approach to the Sephardic diaspora dating back to the late nineteenth century, as seen in the recent ‘Law 12/2015 of 24 June regarding the concession of Spanish nationality to the Sephardic Jews from Spain’ (Maite Ojeda-Mata, “La Ciudadanía Española y Los Sefardíes: Identidades Legitimadoras, Ideologías Étnicas y Derechos Políticos,” Quaderns-e de l’Institut Català d’Antropologia 20, no. 2 (2015): 36–52).

63. The importance of the growing presence of Jewish commercial elites in the Tetouan Ensanche can still be seen today in its buildings, such as the Pasaje Benarroch, at the junction of the current Mohammed V Avenue, a few metres from the Spanish consulate in the city, and the former Primo de Rivera Square, now the Mulay el-Mehdi Square (although still popularly referred to as ‘Primo Square’). Other buildings that serve as witnesses to the importance of the Jewish presence in the Ensanche include the Casino Israelita, which is right next to Primo de Rivera (Mulay el-Mehdi) Square, the nerve centre of the Spanish area, as proved by the prominent presence of the Nuestra Señora de las Victorias Church across from the square.

64. Angy Cohen, “On Belonging and Other Dreams. The Ambiguous Positions of the Jews in ‘Spanish Morocco,’” Contemporary Jewry 40, no. 4 (2020): 547–78.

65. Lorenzo Delgado Gómez-Escalonilla, Imperio de Papel: Acción Cultural y Política Exterior Durante El Primer Franquismo (Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, 1992), 226; Eric Calderwood, “Moroccan Jews and the Spanish Colonial Imaginary, 1903–1951,” Journal of North African Studies 24, no. 1 (2019): 86–110.

66. MB, Act of 4 November 1929.

67. MB, Act of 15 September 1931.

68. MB, Act of 4 February 1935.

69. MB, Act 8 September 1930 and 4 November 1929.

70. MB, Act of 9 February 1931.

71. MB, Acts of 14 February and 4 June 1933.

72. Jessica Marglin, “La Modernité Juridique Au Maroc,” in La Bienvenue et l’adieu 1 (Casablanca: La Croisée des Chemins, 2012), 167–89.

73. Mohammed Kenbib, Les Protégées: Contribution à l’histoire Contemporaine Du Maroc, Théses et Mêmoires, vol. 29 (Rabat: Université Mohammed V, 1996), 36.

74. Mohammed Kenbib, “Systeme Imperial et Bourgeoisie Compradore Au Maroc Au XIXème Siecle,” Revue D´histoire Maghrebine 41–42 (1986): 86–100.

75. Rocío Velasco De Castro, “Las Aspiraciones Del Nacionalismo Marroquí En El Marco de La Segunda Guerra Mundial: Un Pragmatismo Mal Entendido,” Cuadernos de Historia Contemporánea 34 (December 17, 2012): 277–305; Rocío Velasco De Castro, Nacionalismo y Colonialismo En Marruecos (1945–1951): El General Varela y Los Sucesos de Tetuán (Sevilla: Alfar, 2012).

76. Marglin, “La Modernité Juridique Au Maroc”; Jessica M. Marglin, Across Legal Lines: Jews and Muslims in Modern Morocco (New Haven, London: Yale University Press, 2016).

77. MB, Act of 29 March 1931.

78. Nina Pinto-Abecasis, “Towards the Inclusion of Nicknames in the Genres of Folklore: The Case of the Former Jewish Community of Tetuan, Morocco,” Folklore 122, no. 2 (2011): 135–54.

79. MB, Act of 4 February 1937.

80. See, for example, MB, Acts of 26 December 1929 and 8 September 1930.

81. Martín Corrales, “Tensiones Judeo-Musulmanas En El Protectorado Español En Marruecos En Tiempos de La II República (1931–1936)”; Josep Lluís Mateo Dieste, “Paradojas de La Pertenencia Comunitaria: El Litigio Entre Un Judío y Un Musulmán En El Tetuán Colonial,” Quaderns-e de l’Institut Català d’Antropologia 20, no. 2 (2015): 106–25. MB, Act of 10 July 1933.

82. Martín Corrales, “Tensiones Judeo-Musulmanas En El Protectorado Español En Marruecos En Tiempos de La II República (1931–1936).”

83. Eloy Martín Corrales, “Represión Contra Cristianos, Moros y Judíos En La Guerra Civil En El Protectorado Español En Marruecos, Ceuta y Melilla,” in El Protectorado Español En Marruecos: Gestión Colonial e Identidades, ed. Fernando Rodríguez Mediano and Helena de Felipe, vol. 4 (Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, 2002), 111–38; Mourad Zarrouk, Clemente Cerdeira: Intérprete, Diplomático y Espía Al Servicio de La Segunda República (Madrid: Editorial Reus, 2017).

84. Dalit Atrakchi, “The Moroccan Nationalist Movement and Its Attitude toward Jews and Zionism,” in The Divergence of Judaism and Islam (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 2011), 167.